my lilac Wine

Visionary ticks of shivering in the
chest
out last
the fading of A Moon's
smile
hanging limply from Dead of Sky

Vast stretches the turmoil of
skin
bubbling by the Boiling
of
once
hauntingly
cool lips.

DEPARTURE: a fastidious lecture on love

As the sky slinks its way behind a populace of clouds, wanting to hide, i have no doubt, the light thickens, the temperature drops, the aroma of rain snakes into the porous fabric of this life.
i have to pour a Drink, & i do so. It's heavy. Acidic, almost, & i grimace against its advances.
It seems a long time coming, all this, & now it has finally arrived. Left to my own devices, i've spent the infant night trudging about, idly against the grains of this new floor. Tho hungry, i cannot bring myself to eat. What's more, is that i am hungry for different types of edibles: i wonder if a writer can write anywhere. Wonder, just like everything else, if all it takes is getting use to something, hither-to-fore, foreign. i have no answers to any of these questions, & yet, how hungry i remain. So i continue to pace.
Continue to question w/ a head of knowledge, that i will never stumble upon any answers. i cannot. A desert walk in eternity. Parched. Thirsty. Hungry. i find myself lost.
We portend our futures before we even accept our pasts.
Our past is a glimmering train.
Here i would insert a poem but my bones are shaky. A purgatoried mind pilloried before me, makes gnarled faces. It smiles toothlessly. It knows, for now, that the poet has sabbaticalled himself to the reaches of nethers. A poet needs love in some form or another. A poet needs something to rail against w/ naked fist...in some form or another.
There will be no poetry. Not tonight. The echoes are too endless. A smoke racing out a window.
i have nothing to rail against, except time, & my own departure.

THE DAY THAT STOOD STILL, DANCING W/ MY WIFE

i am running out of time.
It is slipping from my fingers like memories of a lifetime Drunk.
Death is not waiting for me to answer the door. He is patient. Simply, he wants me to feel it. To sit & listen to his knocks. They are always different. Not always the knock of Mortality, per say, but always a close enuf tune.
& i do. & i do sit, wait. & i do listen. i am in limbo w/in his hands...& consequently, everyone else's. It's not a good position to be in.
As the cracked-doomed begins to punch thru the horizon, setting scenery aglow in shadowed promises -- that will dissipate in a heart-thump -- i sit, staring at this wooden table. It is covered w/ cigarette ash. If one, perhaps, leaned too comfortably, that One would smell the permeating wretch of spilt, soddened alcohol.
It has a voice, The Aglow, crimininaling those shadowed promises. It speaks in whispers. Soft. Almost toneless. but its tone, nevertheless, is still too strong to ignore. i know, i've tried many a time. All to no avail.
The pathetic Orb is higher in the sky now & i wish it would go away but it won't. i know it won't it never does & this saddens me.
i am running out of time.
i don't have a day to spare, but yet, still, it is beginning.
Fuck me.

LIONS, TIGERS, & ME, OH MY

i have been up for a day & 1/2 now. No sleep. my eyes are hanging on thin cords of heated metal pulled taut, stretching the nerves to searing screams. my body is lamenting for the flowered oasis of a bed. my mind whirls round & round in no particular direction, w/ no particular destination. & my fingers fall silent. They are tame & docile as a paralyzed cat.
my hands are concrete blocks in water. my head, swimming in a stratosphere not of the atmosphere. i am barely hanging on.
The drug certainly is working its way thru my body now.
'When, Jackson, have you ever held on?' A voice whispers.
It lingers there, the voice, as if on replay, as if coaxing an insanity to the surface of one who knows not the difference between then & now. & suddenly i become frightened of my cigarette, snuff it out, & pour a Pour fit for a Drunken king.
As i fall ass backwards, frightfully trembling, into a corner of this room, my lips kissing the tops of my knees, my arms hugging the life out of the mother of my shins, their faces begin to appear. They float there on a bed of weakened light. Staring.
Prepared for the worst, i slip another cigarette between my lips, SPARK, & inhale my life in a single drag.

& at the moment, i am Parched Desert Drenched.
i am a Time where Time once stood.
i am venerable, cracked & worn, framed against the wall.
i am now the Pupil of The Petal.
i am the farce that reflects the honesty of a beating heart infected w/ roaches.

W/ my exhale, these faces scatter like confetti, blown to pieces out & into a world that is entirely my own. & i find myself, once again, sitting stupidly inside the comma of a wall, staring at a history yet written, but believing otherwise.
Isn't believing 1/2 the battle?

BLANK DAYS

The cajoling laughter is a farce. But they think it's real. The reverence & respect handed out w/ a smile to all the clients & salesmen, is nothing more then a sinister joke w/ a punch-line only i get, one made for some type of self-preservation. The orders barked out daily come from a costumed-mouth, somehow pantomiming the idea & phrase: I CARE! & they all believe this sincere. Perhaps my almost-daily-attendance corroborates the former & negates whatever latter i can come up w/.
At home, a cigarette dangling from my mouth, i go over all this finely & meticulously. It doesn't make me feel any better, only worse. But there is nothing else for me to do. i try to turn my attention to the others of past, but the thought of Steven Chamberlain, or Leonard Demoine, Thad Fellows, brings a rumbling sickness to my stomach at the moment; sometimes, on some days, a look back is too much, so i continue w/ the parade of days that is everyday.
i begin to find fault w/ what i do. my life, as it pertains to their living, is nothing more then an empty sack; a writhing devil of a dream unable to awake from.
A cycle of macabre deference to the dying wise.
A glass, & no Pour.
Cause & effect w/ no affect.
"Hey," my wife says, walking thru the front door. "There's an undergraduate reading his poetry at the library tonight. Wanna go?"
No, i state simply.
"Why?"
i have no desire to listen to an undergraduate's poetry.
"But he's a nice guy," she informs me.
i sigh, get up, & walk to the kitchen to pour a Drink.
Tonight will be the same as always. Tomorrow will be no different.
& like a pill, i will swallow the Moon & wait for its effect. It has no thorns, but never-the-less, it wreaks havoc on the lining of a stomach chewing & biting on the limbs of all these blank days.

TENDER IS THE NIGHT SET AFIRE

There is something to be said about taking a shit late at night w/ the lights extinguished, surrounded by nothing but silence. A silky curtain drapes about you. The air seems to kiss itself into a Sunday nap. The body slips into a hot-spring, naked. A shot of Whisky. A line of Coke. A line of Poetry completed.
At such times, i think of a sooth-sayer for the past.
i am remembering the first time i had ever heard Jeff Buckley.
It was in an apt. building justly dubbed, The Roach Motel. As per usual back then, my friend & i were stoned to paralysis, lying on his floor in the dark for what could have been days, or even just moments, picture-painting aloud the ceiling w/ our thoughts & visions, roaches calmly climbing over us; to them, we weren't even there.
Beside myself w/ waves of intensifying thought, i struggled to rise myself.
"Hang-on," he said. "Stay there. I've something for you."
It would be this very night that would spawn so much of everything that was to transpire for years to come. An awakening. A nightmare. It would be the very thing that made me who i am today, for better or for worse. i wouldn't have this realization for at least another decade.
In the dark of E.H's apt., flat upon my back, i couldn't focus, couldn't think clearly, & at that moment, it seemed that was the most clear thing i could be thinking or feeling.
Far off, i could mutely hear E.H. rummaging around, softly cursing for taking so long to find whatever it was he was trying to find.
Finally, w/ a voice made of tender glass, "listen." He said.
As Buckley's voice exited the speakers, & slid into my ears, my breathing slowed. My heart quickened. The air thickened w/ each note he sang. The walls began to breath w/ life. The snow quilting the valley outside became a symphony of melancholy, & suddenly the night was set afire by the spark of the change of two boys.
What that change was, even now, i cannot define. Cannot place a word to it, but can only feel that night living in the marrow of my bones.
As i flush, that night that was so tender, so long ago, turns to a tinder of something like a dream.

Lucidity, A river, & its Corona

The SLC is a small town in regards to art. If you are an artist, if you attribute yourself such a goddamned title, you know just about every other one; it's sickening.
The mass conglomeration of hipsters in this town constipates me to an ever-lasting degree. My brow attached to their strings - a perpetual down-ward tug. Call me... Scowl.
These streets are filled w/ bouncing cadence memorized for the imminent foreclosure of the soul - while being young is still hip. These streets, in all their beautiful glory, are stomped upon by a great measure of futility; their voices never able to reach the echo-canyon of history. Foot-prints, here, are embedded in sand.
The air is saturated w/ speech & hymn sung to many, but heard only by the deaf. i idly wonder, in easier times, if Brautigan's Blast is ever heard. This i doubt, for how can one hear another's blast, when their own trigger is broken?
The difference between remembrance & actuality astounds me.
i remember nights like these. Cannot place them, but remember.
Another Bottle to make love to.
Another Dream to have.
Another another to have.
& the world moves on.

kaleidoscope

i am standing under the azure of day next to my mail box, my hand idly holding mail that will never be opened. i feel like i am in a trance. A summer's clear sky can do that. It can hold you captive w/ no particular meaning. It just sends you into limbo, & w/out a choice, things, shapes, begin to swirl before your vision. Today, i am a kaleidoscope.
i drop the mail from my hand, sending it scattering to the porch & sit down. W/ the dreams for now out of the way, my wife still gone, i light a cigarette & begin to twist myself. Shapes & colours dance before me in no particular way. W/ each twist, each turn, they form an image, break up & form another. i stare like a mule seemingly into nothing. & at the moment, i am a mule. Or a tree. Or... a mist from the past, dewing upon everything. Slick & wet.
The air is desert-hot but i do not notice the tears of sweat forming on my brow. Cars zip by on 9th ST but i take no notice of their monstrous bellows. Passers-by talk of everything but i hear nothing of anything, only the grating of my own twisting.
All at once, these shapes, these colours, make sense to me. They form into bodies that are familiar, or at least, once were. Right there is William Everton, a self proclaimed father, a leader, a Flesh among Spirits. Over there, is Leonard Demoine writing as if tomorrow may never be realized, & perhaps it just might not be. Standing in front of me is Thad Fellows, a Dreamer of the worst sort, a partner in crime, a friend, a fellow prisoner of unbreakable shackles. Off in the distance there stands, in a hazy font, Jewel & Rose. They are waving. Both of them holding notebooks bound by chains. Waving goodbye or hello, i cannot tell.
Thad seems to be telling me something. i cannot hear him. i can smell the odor wafting from his skin. William, too, is telling me something but it seems something more like a warning but...
"What are you doing out here?"
& like the snap of bone, these images flick out of sight & i look up.
My wife is standing before me. She has returned.
Grabbing the mail, i tell her, & we tromp up the steps to our apartment, to our home, & close the door, the lock yelling into place.

as we Sleep

i am dreaming again.

the quick River

As the heavy weight of avalanche spills over my hot skin, i see it melt into liquid felt, caressing a skin that fights against Hump of dry skin...The sun risen does nothing for my rose-petaled rash. i await the next moment. i await a soothing meant for meditation. It will come...in theory... i am not a scientist, just a boy, singing a croon, w/ no tune.

Awaiting the Phoenix

i awake to a cold sweat snailing down my face, feeling like i'm masticating insects. In-fact, i, myself, feel like an insect. Not as a whole, but rather, segmented from myself, not of my self. i do not understand this & in the dark, the hand of confusion presses upon me even more firmly.
i reach for the flesh of my wife - something to grab, hold, that is more firm then the fabric of a Dream. Instead i come away clutching the fabric of the sheets, & somehow that is more hollow then any Dream.
She is out of town.
This occurs to me only after i search the house for her fleshy bosom to rest my head that is spinning in a tumult of avalanching clouds. i stand there in a stupor trying to remember when she is to return, but i can't. i just simply...cannot...remember. This is worse then the fact that she is gone: the non-remembrance of her ETA is a beetle burrowing into my ear. It is a slash across the epidermis, drawing blood. It is a corset, not to remember. & at a time like this, the strings pull taut, & there is nothing else to do but immerse yourself confusingly back into the shadows & await for the cosmic Phoenix to rise yet again.
& that's exactly what i do.

THE DREAM CAFE (a singing prelude)

& now the rooftop Lullaby sings in the darkened cords of the insected-sky. What we have we will take w/ us; what we take w/ us will be lost to us forever. The insects are crawling upon my skin w/ the Itch of loss, the way the Moon's skin itches during Lunar eclipse. The way reverie itches the mind; nostalgic Beasts roar from the thinning clouds like Buffalo. Sparkling citedals house the scum of the earth below, & it is only that from which i gain memory.
In the dangling electric cords of the mourning, when memory is oft times at its Apex, the wooden walls of imagination bemoan w/ Crucifixtion's weakness; for weeks now, surrounded i have been w/ Lunar Lunacy & Solar Stigma - no waxing or waning for my combustible viens; no warming nor cooling of my becoming reptilian skin: things stay constant w/ only an illusion of change.
Imminent skull-fragmenting pressure is being released thru hot exhausting exhales of wild beasts - the Ash of ear-skin blown out into the shrinking Universe like sex.
All this, this elastic nightmare, is unfolding at a crucial Time, at a crucial bone-splintering speed. Luckily enuf, Bones by Nature break. i can hear them like a Moon's trumpet, cracking, wailing, splintering, exploding thru the walls of this cafe; from up out the floor upon which my feet nervously dance & twitter, these sounds vibrate. Inside the labrynth of each of these patron's movement Death resides - a residue, an adhesive, upon which is stuck the falsehood of living.
Thru such comotion, thru such noise, i sit; thru such comotion, thru such noise, if listened to closely, there lies a shadow of silence - a sliver of nothingness, or, nothingness as in a vestige of life past that exists no longer except in the folds of the brain, & before all this: the Writing, the Drinking, the Fornicating w/ thought - before the Writing in youthful play-time-whoo-yee-hawing is where i fall back to the pasty cracked alligator streets of my neighborhood child-trance Back to the skin of friends, that now, in retrospect, glistened the Opals of fabricated obscurity Back to the days where smiles broadend daily for the daily milk of the soul Before the Writing i go back to the boiling pots of storm's amazing grace-heated-rain Back to the time where angels were more real then haggard smoke-beaten reflections ahh.
& there are mirrored fractions of myself, stratigically or not, placed about the world. In every nook, every crack, in every easy chair, kitchen, cafe, in every plume of cigarette smoke, in every cathedral, in every action in a mindless fuck performed - in every city placed thru-out the world, there i am hiding, crouching, resting, cooking, Drinking coffee, smoking, praying to god to reveal to me the plasicity of his own fabrications, copulating w/ something i believe to be a woman, in every city thru-out i am dying & living at the same time thru an epochal grave-site where both that of flesh & rot are welcome, only they see not a difference of the thin space between shattered mirrors & broken flesh - Amaze! - the heart stopping breath of none stopping traffic which courses thru bleary-eyed lines of destitution.
& the electrocuted brain that hangs from the corridors of teeth - suspended in the sky w/ illuminated sun & moon reflecting the actions of poor woe-be-gone flesh, stripped & actioned toward the Abortion of Self, transplanted upon pages that can seeminglynever turn; pages upon which hearts exhume the transcription of nature; Today, among fossils whom puke noise - the shattering-glass-breaking noise of chattering, expecting teeth, wrapped in silent odor.
The clouds will pass in mimickry over the epeleptic sky, its grounds shake malignant corsets thru the rivers of breaking bones, setting in motion, the volotile movements of calenders in motion. Days passw/ reason, reasoning out the insignificant. Fingers are bleeding. Mind wheeling, pulling existance taut.
The city's stifling heat produces the garbage of mind & the garbage of mind, strewn & littered across a diminishing horizon, is the uplift of upheaval.
It is this city, this very city, where buildings stand tall only by the upside-down-thought-upright reflective universal siezuring sky - all so crazy such things are - the clown faces of clouds, the majestic Ringmasters whose hats tilt on the head of the axis of the earth like crazy bugged-out nightmares revealing themselves in the Sun's glare, whilst Van Goghe's ear skitters toward a shelter of shadow that resides deep in the heart of secret passions.
& all that sadness you can't get away from like the dead - fish love of america - all that road going all the time - swooping & diving, curving like the spine-back of a crazy old woman; the page is long, like these days have become long like the equation of the tired distance between finding Mortality & accepting it - a worrisome difference.
It is getting late, & w/ this comes the stretching of the page, the Writer's incurrable disease: a cancer set in the colon of the mind - an attempt to find a finish in all things w/in the impossible void of nothing's eternity.

DREAM OF THE BUG

W/ each gulp the shivers rack my body. Convulsively my skin raises & thumps.
My wife hates it...each...single...fucking Gulp.
The problem, you see, is this: as each epochal night glides criminally across a field of a thousand weeping eyes, as if in prayer, she holds wilting flowers against my bare chest, that once did not belong to her, & claims the sincerity of their odorous hope.
W/ sticky reservation, my wife snoring softly beside me, i slip out of bed, unable to shake the Night's dream from my head, & traverse the length of our shotty apartment to a main window that looks out over 9nth street.
It is superbly quiet. The dark, calming & soothing. So much so that i am not even sure if i am awake. Dreams...& Reality are like that sometimes...it's maddening.
How many times have i stood in this very spot wondering about the novels of our lives? i think to myself. How many times, on eternal nights such as these, have i concluded that the end is always worse then chapter one? & how many times am i to go on w/ questions w/ no intention of seeking answers? All this racing thru my weakened brain, as i laugh, chuckle, boar into myself & pour a liquid gold river into a pathetic plastic cup.
i can sense, in the mollified air, a shift, a change, a darkening of light, but what? i question myself.
"goddammit," i say aloud, because such questions are nothing but a useless song, & return to bed, awaiting the arrival of mourning, which, i suppose, is already here.
"i am nothing like a bug," i say to her closed lids, & rest my head against pillow. & begin to dream.

Introduction

i could tell you that i like a spring breeze breathing thru my hair. Or that the laughter of children cascades over me as would a tropical waterfall. i could even tell you that the love of awakening upon a volcanic sunrise whilst entwined w/ a sleeping lover sends me aflutter upon crystal wings of rapture...but then i would be nothing more than a harbinger of lies, left to tongue my own sourness.
Henry Miller would be proud. For when i am not thinking of poetry, or abhorrence (i am incapable of divorcing the two), i am thinking about cock & cunt meeting one another.
i cannot go anywhere w/out a look of irritation, of derision,of the utmost suspicion, & i cannot figure out why.
Perhaps, tho, my better half tells me, is that the past shines thru much like a polished coin, more so then the acted self; that,perhaps, my better half goes on, the acted self is actually less translucent then that self believes.
i refuse to own mirrors, thus have never had a decent look at myself.
As a naked eye cracks a mystery sewn underneath waves of rippling flesh, a flash, a crack of doom or light, i find myself in needing to mouth the truth, to clink my teeth to the notes which have always criminaled away from me, & sing.
For who wants to be such a harbinger to a self who wants the sun but supposes in the moon's darkened fairy-tales?
But then again, who just wants to sing?